AN­DREW WILKIN­SON

LEADER, BC LIB­ERAL PARTY

NEW The cur­rent leader of the BC Lib­eral Party has a bad hand to play. The pub­lic hates his party, and ev­ery time he tries to launch an at­tack on the NDP over casi­nos, ICBC or al­most any­thing, crit­ics sneer and say, “Who are you to talk? You cre­ated this mess.” But Wilkin­son, a west-side for­mer doc­tor, for­mer lawyer and for­mer Rhodes Scholar, is stay­ing calm and hold­ing it to­gether. That’s no small ac­com­plish­ment for a party that is fa­mous for frac­tur­ing at times into its com­po­nent parts of ru­ral con­ser­va­tives and more ur­ban lib­er­als. He has man­aged to bring the party up in the polls to near NDP lev­els, in spite of the chal­lenges.